The main character in Adam Smyer’s debut novel is filled with rage. Rage about injustice. Rage about fellow passengers on a bus. Rage about traffic. Lots of rage about traffic.

But the El Cerrito author swears “Knucklehead” (Akashic Books, $15.95, 340 pages) is not a memoir. Sure, Marcus Hayes, the narrator, went to law school, as did Smyer. And, yeah, Marcus grew up in New York City and attended NYU, as did Smyer. Marcus, like Smyer, relocated to the Bay Area. Not a memoir?

Akashic Books

Smyer laughs. “Somebody once told me, ‘write what you know.’ So, the book is maybe extremely loosely based on things in my life.”

“Knucklehead” is already being lauded by reviewers as “refreshingly honest,” “uncategorizably original,” with “rip-roaring humor,” and, as James Baldwin Fellow novelist Mat Johnson says, its “exploration of rage is unflinching, brave and absolutely brilliant.”

Smyer’s already been compared to some of the great novels about the African-American experience, such as Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” which centered on a youth living in Chicago’s Southside in the 1930s, and James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” set in the same time period, featuring a 14-year-old boy in Harlem.

“Knucklehead” takes place in the 1980s and ’90s. It opens with Marcus on a 7 a.m. New York City bus filled with, as he describes it, sheep. Nobody wants to get involved with the privileged “frat boy in a suit” who’s pushing other passengers so he can get more room. Marcus is the only one who calls him on it. Frat boy invites him into an alley. Frat boy gets a baton in the neck, because Marcus’ anger is always on simmer, and you never know when you’ll encounter a weapon.

Soooo, if you write what you know…

Smyer laughs again. “It’s not a 300-page confession. That would just be stupid. I have much better impulse control than Marcus does.”

However. Some stuff happened. Smyer, 52, was born in the South Bronx and lived there for “nine years of terror,” with his parents keeping him inside most of the time. Then they moved to Gramercy Park in Manhattan. “I damn near thought ‘The Jeffersons’ was a documentary. But the first thing I did was beat up every kid in the neighborhood. Thank goodness, they forgave me, and we’re still friends.”

The “Knucklehead” narrative thread is hinged to major events in American history in the ’80s and ’90s. Rodney King. OJ. Timothy McVeigh. Lack of consequences. Marcus stews.

But there’s a girl. He meets the beautiful, sweet Amalia in law school. They move to San Francisco and get married. Marcus controls his anger. Then Amalia dies, and he goes off the rails. Quits the law firm. Takes up with someone who’s seriously nuts, but in a cute way (at first).

Marcus feels targeted because of the color of his skin. He thinks policemen were pulling him over just because. Maybe they were. But he does have a habit of running stop signs. He’s angry, and he’s antagonistic, and he’s confrontational.

Smyer chose the time period because he was the same age in the ’80s and ’90s. “Something very special happens when you come of age. It’s the first time sex becomes something you could just have; no one is waiting for you to come home. You can decide to just not go to bed all night. Autonomy … it left quite a mark.”

So did the injustices, particularly one he remembers from 1988. “Nobody even remembers James Bird Jr. – he was dragged for three miles behind a pickup truck. Three miles!” The white supremacists who killed him were found guilty and sentenced to death, “so there’s that,” Smyer continues. “It looks different, now. Tech nerds with tiki torches aren’t the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Smyer didn’t set out to write a novel. He’s always been a writer, just jotting down stories. One of the scenes in the book takes place in a movie theater, another has Marcus buying a hot boombox from thugs. Eventually, Smyer realized Marcus’ stories could become a full-length novel. “It was a little out of the blue. It was like a dream, my brain was mooshing together all these things, embellishing, fabricating, craziness. That’s what writing this was like.”

Smyer was a labor and employment lawyer; unlike Marcus, he had no interest in criminal law. “Becoming a lawyer was never even a choice for me, it’s what I am. I like the problem solving, explaining, anticipating, stratifying.” He currently works in human resources at a law office but is still a member of the Bar. His wife — the real, very much alive “Amalia” — is a tech blogger.

And now, Smyer will be spending a lot of time on the road promoting “Knucklehead.” He says sure, he wants everyone to read it. “But I was very much preaching to the choir. I didn’t want to get into that trap, trying to make it accessible to everyone. I just want to tell stories that resonate.”

AUTHOR EVENT

Adam Smyer will be launching “Knucklehead” at Pegasus Books, 2349 Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 22, and will read at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building at 6 p.m. March 6. Both events are free.